Neighbors are kinda like relatives…you don’t get to pick ‘em.
And sometimes just like relatives, you kinda wish that you didn’t have to see them or deal with them either.

Over the years, we’ve lived next door to an assortment of very strange neighbors.
(Certainly they could never have felt that same way about us!)………………….

There was a mean looking older couple who lived next door to us near Folsom Lake.
Seemed they were angry at life.
They never said one nice thing to us and I never saw a smile.
I decided early on that she was just a menopausal witch and let it go at that.

The rest of the neighborhood was great but that lady and her husband were just plain mean and nasty.
They had scowled faces, just real crabby lookin’ all the time.

There were six of us in our family at that time and there were four cars. I know that’s a lot but we had a houseful of teenaged girls; we worked…..they worked.

Sometimes one of our parked cars would extend a bit in front of the SIDE of crabby neighbors house.
When this happened, her menopausal inner-self would appear.
She and her husband would confront our kids…always when we weren’t home, yell at them for parking anywhere near their property and demand they park elsewhere.

We told our girls numerous times to try to ignore them, say nothing and it was OK for them to park there when they had no other spot.
We assured them that the neighbors didn’t own the street.

Anyways, it wasn’t like we were taking up their only spots to park, they had a driveway and a garage.

Now, I know this could possibly get on a particular type of person’s nerves.
I understood, they just didn’t want cars parked in front of their house.
I actually got it…..I guess.

There was a time when an old beat up RV motorhome parked smack across the street from us and stayed there for 4 or 5 days and nights.
It was when “Breaking Bad” had the attention of a very huge TV audience and Mr White was cookin’ meth in a motorhome similar to the one that was parked across the street and well, I gotta say it scared me a little bit.

Police were finally notified, and Mr White’s motorhome disappeared.

But our cars weren’t beat up pieces of crap like in the series, meth wasn’t being cooked in them and they were gone most of the time.
So it wasn’t quite the same thing.

One morning one of our girls went out to her car to find four flat tires.
We knew that wasn’t just a strange coincidence or a stroke of horrible luck.

The very next morning after the flat tire incident my daughter called me at work. She was crying…..no wait, she was sobbing.

She told me the nasty neighbors had parked one of their cars touching her back fender and the other touching her front fender and she couldn’t get her car out to go to work.
She knocked on their door and asked them to please let her out and they said NO!

That was the enough-is-enough point for me.
You don’t like to hear your kid cryin’ like that for such a crazy, dumb-ass reason.

Meanwhile in the ER, the EMT’s and couple of cops were just finishing up with a drunk driver they’d brought in for us to deal with.

We talked for a few minutes then I told them I had to head back home and why.

The cops suggested I stayed and worked and they’d take care of it.
Wow, I hadn’t thought of calling the cops and there they were!
I lived just minutes down the street so it was no big deal for them.
I called my daughter and told her help was on the way.

The next call from my daughter had a way different message.

“Mom, a cop car pulled up to my trapped car with the red lights blinking AND an ambulance was right behind them with their lights on too.”

She told me the neighbors moved the two blocking cars fast and she heard the police telling them that they didn’t own the street.
Where had she heard that before?

That evening we realized we really had to knock on their door and confront their crabby butts.

We had no proof that they had anything to do with those tires but, they needed to quit harassing our girls and if they ever blocked one of them in again they’d have an attorney standin’ on their porch.
Yep, that’s what we were gonna tell ‘em!

We decided to wait til the week-end for the show-down, giving us time to drink and recover after the anticipated ordeal.

I guess right here I should admit that the next morning, she was outside as I was going to my car.
I kinda yelled over to her that she was a menopausal witch and she needed to see her doctor and get on medication.

I figured that was just some medical advice from the neighbor nurse next door, right?
I mean I had my white uniform on.

The next morning after that, my husband and I walked out to our cars together and noticed a big sign on the neighbors grass.

FOR SALE.

A little extreme, don’t you think?

At that point, I guess we could have gone over and told them our rental lease was up in four months and we’d be moving and they should just hang tight, stick it out and the hillbillies with all the cars would be gone.

But well, somehow, we just never got over there and then one morning the big sign said,

SOLD!

We never saw those two crabby faces again and four months later we moved on.

We figured we’d never have to deal with such strange neighbors again.

Wrong……….